Blue Ribbon Report, Vol. 80: Picking the ultimate hero of Championship Week and making a bunch of athletics director's jobs easier
Today’s edition of the Blue Ribbon Report
Joseph Dycus on the career and legend of Chattanooga’s David Jean-Baptiste.
Chris Dortch’s public service to athletics directors conducting searches for basketball coaches.
Second by second with Chattanooga’s David Jean-Baptiste as he becomes a legend of March
David Jean-Baptiste (Joseph Dycus)
By Joseph Dycus (@joseph_dycus)
David Jean-Baptiste glances at the clock amid the purple pandemonium engulfing his end of the court. Furman’s Mike Bothwell is rounding back from under the basket after he had just slotted a lefty layup in to give Furman a 63-61 lead over Chattanooga in the Southern Conference Tournament.
There are 4.3 seconds left. An eternity, and yet no time at all. Enough time to get a shot despite starting 94 feet away from the basket, but a daunting obstacle when facing five electrified defenders who can taste the NCAA Tournament’s sweet nectar on their tired tongues.
When the clock stops after Bothwell’s layup, six seconds elapse as the Mocs get ready to inbound the ball. In that tenth of a minute, Chattanooga’s sixth-year senior has an epiphany as the team’s sterling season appeared to crumble around him on Asheville’s golden court.
“I remembered what my ex would say: ‘Stay focused no matter what.’ Everyone was in shock, so I’m looking this way and I see people in purple going crazy,” Jean-Baptiste says a few days afterward. “And I’m like ‘Damn, we just lost.’ But then I think ‘stay focused’ and it was just like … that little bit of ‘stay focused’ made me realize there was still time left and we could win the game.”
Not many stories can be told in 4.3 seconds, but not many tales are as dramatic as Jean-Baptiste’s.
4.3 SECONDS LEFT: JEAN-BAPTISTE RUNS ACROSS THE FACE OF THE BASKET AND CATCHES THE INBOUNDS PASS FROM DARIUS BANKS. HE TAKES ONE DRIBBLE AND BEGINS TO MOVE UP THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE COURT. THERE ARE THREE SECONDS LEFT.
“With four seconds, it was to get as close as possible,” Jean-Baptiste says. “Once I saw I had that much time, I knew it was enough time to get a shot attempt. Because there ain’t no way I was losing without getting a shot up.”
Six years earlier, Jean-Baptiste was one of three incoming freshmen guards from Matt McCall’s last recruiting class as Chattanooga’s head coach. While Rodney Chatman and Makale Foreman became reserves in their first season on campus, the 18-year-old from Miami redshirted. Unable to play in games, practices became his entire world.
“I used to come into practice hoping I’d have a good practice, just so I could have a good day,” Jean-Baptiste says. “I put so much pressure on myself to have a good practice so I could have a good day.”
After a year spent honing his skills in practice against a veteran team, Jean-Baptiste was poised to join his class as a contributor in his redshirt freshman season. He would no longer be confined to the bench.
3.0 SECONDS LEFT: JEAN-BAPTISTE IS GUARDED BY ALEX HUNTER, AND SO HE CROSSES OVER TO HIS LEFT HAND AND BEGINS TO TAKE A DIAGONAL PATH TO MIDCOURT. MARCUS FOSTER STARTS TO DOUBLE-TEAM JEAN-BAPTISTE JUST AS THE BALL GETS TO THE SOCON LOGO.
“My thing was, I was going to get it and run down the right sideline,” Jean-Baptiste says. “But Hunter is a quicker player, so with three seconds left my thought process was, he’s too quick and there was no way I was getting around him. I saw he was coming, and I just wanted to get away.”
Jean-Baptiste had a typical redshirt freshman season, where he showed flashes of the player he would eventually become and would look lost in others. One of his best games came against Tennessee-Wesleyan, where Jean-Baptiste scored a season-high 18 points and played 28 minutes in late November.
“We always talk about trying to establish an identity,” coach Lamont Paris said in the postgame interview all those years ago. “If someone was watching us for the first time, how would they classify our team? Playing hard and getting after it is one thing we want to do. There are some other things, but David comes in and just plays hard.”
Chattanooga may not have won many games, especially in the SoCon—the Mocs sat at rock bottom with a 3-15 record—but the youthful guard triumvirate was obviously the future of the team.
Then it wasn’t.
Chatman transferred to Dayton and got to throw lobs to Obi Toppin for a season. Foreman left for Stony Brook and turned himself into a 15 points-per-game scorer. Jean-Baptiste stayed put. It took just one summer for him to find himself a stranger on his own team. It hurt at first, but the dramatic change forced Jean-Baptiste out of his freshman-year(s) mindset.
“After that redshirt year and Rodney and Makale left, it was like a part of me left with them,” Jean-Baptiste says. “We all liked going to battle together. After they left, I branched out and found distractions to keep myself busy.”
“My high school teacher told me something I’ll never forget. She said ‘David, you’re more than just a basketball player, and remember that.’ After that year, I realized I’m more than just a player. I guess my character allowed me to be around different people and to branch out. I’d just show up [to events] and start meeting new people.”
2.0 SECONDS LEFT: JEAN-BAPTISTE CONTINUES HIS PATH DOWN THE LEFT SIDELINE AND AWAY FROM FURMAN’S TWO DEFENDERS. HE TAKES TWO DRIBBLES WITHIN THIS ONE-SECOND SPAN AND THEN GATHERS THE BALL.
“If you look at the replay, I looked up,” Jean-Baptiste says. “I realized I could get even closer. So, it was one more dribble after that, and then I popped up.”
It takes Jean-Baptiste a moment to come up with an answer to the question of “What advice would you tell your 19-year-old self?” He considers what his younger version fretted and worried about, and then comes up with his answer.
“That feels like ages ago,” he says. “Damn, I was 19 [in 2017]. I would tell him, ‘Whatever reason you may have your head down, or whatever has you feeling down and not thinking you’re gonna have a good career, it’s not gonna last forever.’ I’d tell 19 year-old DJB that stormy weather don’t last forever.”
In what is a gross over-simplification of the next couple of years, Jean-Baptiste grew into the top option on the floor and established himself as a gregarious and charismatic persona off it. There was still stormy weather, like when he left the team for a couple of weeks during the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic in winter 2020 before returning.
But there were even more happy moments as Jean-Baptiste blossomed into the face of a team that steadily grew from a bottom-feeder to a true contender within the conference. 2022 has been the result of that half-decade of building, where the Mocs won the regular-season title and sported the conference coach and player [Malachi Smith] of the year.
“I always talk about this book that I'm gonna write when this is all said and done, and the longest chapter will be titled, 'DJB III,' ” Paris said after the Furman game. “It’s surreal what has transpired—the good, the bad, the ugly—we've been all over the place as a team, and for it to come down to that, I literally am now committed to writing that book and telling that story."
And up until the last four seconds of the Furman game, the 2022 conference tournament part of that book looked reasonably sunny for the Mocs. Jean-Baptiste, Smith, and high-profile Kansas transfer Silvio De Sousa took down a spirited Citadel in the opener before blowing the doors off Wofford in the semifinals.
But Furman wanted to play the role of spoiler—and make its first NCAA tournament since 1980—and traded body blows as if it were in a prizefight instead of a basketball game. Chattanooga rallied from a dismal 16-26 halftime deficit and exchanged buckets in overtime, where Furman went 5 of 5 from the field. But the Paladins made a mistake by scoring their last basket, which gave them a 63-61 lead, with time left on the clock.
After six dribbles across sixty feet in three seconds, Jean-Baptiste had one second and one shot left.
1:0 SECOND LEFT: JEAN-BAPTISTE GATHERS THE BALL IN HIS LEFT HAND AS HE STEPS ON THE RED INGLES GROCERY STORE LOGO. THIRTY FEET FROM THE BASKET, HE JUMPS AS HIGH AS POSSIBLE AND CATAPULTS THE BALL BEHIND AND THEN OVER HIS HEAD IN AN EXAGGERATED MOTION THAT LASTS 0.7 OF A TICK. THE BALL IS IN THE AIR AS THE BUZZER SOUNDS.
“It’s crazy how quickly the thought process was,” Jean-Baptiste says. “I knew with one second left I had to get it up. When it was four seconds, I knew I couldn’t lose without getting a shot up. I’ve seen so many teams lose without getting one up, and I was like ‘I have to get it up and at least give us a chance.’ ”
Malachi Smith knew the ball was going in. Silvio De Sousa had no doubt. Josh Ayeni, the oldest player in college basketball at 25, proclaimed he’s “got zero doubts in Dave” making the shot of a lifetime. The man himself says he had prepared for that moment for years.
“If you asked any close friends, they’d tell you [I act out a last-second buzzer-beater scenario] all the time,” Jean-Baptiste says. “Just playing around the house with a garbage can, or a dirty sock and a laundry basket.”
ZERO SECONDS LEFT: THE SHOT RIPS THROUGH THE NET. THE MOCS ARE GOING TO THE NCAA TOURNAMENT. JEAN BAPTISTE RUNS FORWARD AND THEN TURNS AND BEGINS TO SPRINT AWAY FROM HIS CHATTANOOGA TEAMMATES WHO ARE CHASING HIM.
“I just knew to run,” he says. “I had no other feeling left in my body other than to run as fast as possible. I guess like I was heading to the locker room, and what made me turn around was I saw there was a lot of purple on that side.”
“The first person I saw was [teammate] Ashton [Smith], and he’s my boy. I wrapped his arms around my head, and then everyone else came. I just cried. I couldn’t feel. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t really, just, like, move. I just had to stop. I just broke down. I can’t even explain.”
The immediate result was a conference championship and the Mocs’ first trip to the NCAA Tournament since 2016—the season before Jean-Baptiste arrived on campus. In the hours that followed came the interviews with famous figures like Jeff Goodman, shout-outs from NFL superstars like Patrick Mahomes, a spot as the top play on ESPN’s SportsCenter. For Jean-Baptiste, the euphoric ending was just a bonus to a career for which he was already proud.
“Everything up to that point was ‘DJB 3, great career, like boom,’ ” He says. “Even senior night, and hitting that 3 at the end in Chattanooga, it was like boom, great career, legend or whatever. Even after that, people were saying to retire my jersey. So to do that [and hit the shot to beat Furman], it’s just crazy.“
One moment in postgame may not have made national news, but it was a precious one for Jean-Baptiste. As he cut down the net, Chattanooga’s iconic guard wore the Haitian flag draped over his broad shoulders. Jean-Baptiste represented the national team in 2018 FIBA competition and now brought glory to his family’s nation in a way only an athlete can.
“To be able to represent my parent’s home country, where they were born and raised, in that way means everything to me,” he says. “Haiti is thought of as a third world country, and people know about the earthquakes and adversity and what the people have gone through as a whole. For me to be able to put us in a positive light, it’s a dream.”
After Sunday’s NCAA Tournament selection show, the Mocs will know who they play. It will certainly be a Power Six team with brand recognition and great athletes up and down the lineup. But the Mocs have Jean-Baptiste and a team that knows how to win big games. And unlike the final play of Monday night’s classic, David Jean-Baptiste will have more than 4.3 seconds to make a miracle happen.
You have to like his odds.
If I were the AD at…
Mike Rhoades (VCUAthletics.com)
By Chris Dortch (@cdortch)
The coaching carousel is starting to spin faster and faster, with three more power conference jobs—Kansas State, Georgia, and Missouri—having jumped on to go with the two that have been open for weeks—Maryland and Louisville.
If I oversaw the searches at those four schools, here’s who I would hire. Scratch that. Let’s start with who I wouldn’t, or couldn’t hire at any of those schools because they aren’t budging from their current locations—Bruce Pearl (loves Auburn, has NCAA baggage), Nate Oates (loves Alabama, has a stacked recruiting class signed for 2022-23), Andy Enfield (just got locked up with a multi-year deal at USC), Eric Musselman (loves Arkansas, has an even more stacked recruiting class than Alabama’s coming in), and Ed Cooley (loves Providence, grew up there, is the 18th highest-paid coach in the country at more than $3 million a year.)
Now that the reality check is over, here are the coaches I would hire if I were the athletics director at:
Georgia—This one would be over quickly. Jonas Hayes, the 40-year-old associate head coach at Xavier, would crawl from Cincinnati to Athens. Not that he doesn’t love Xavier. It’s just that Georgia’s in his blood after having spent a combined 11 years there as a player and assistant coach. Hayes is from Atlanta and knows how to recruit that talent-rich city, no easy feat. His name is well known throughout the state, where there are other pockets of talent from top to bottom.
What about the Xs and Os, you ask? I’ve had some interesting conversations about strategy with Hayes, and I’m convinced he can hold his own. But what makes him the best candidate at his alma mater, even over established head coaches, is charisma, personality, and recruiting. No one is a good coach without good players, and Hayes would keep many of Georgia’s best players at home.
My guess is he would hire his twin brother Jarvis off Rob Lanier’s staff at Georgia State, probably hire another assistant coach with Georgia ties, and then maybe a former head coach to give him an experienced sounding board.
Kansas State—I hated to see Bruce Weber go here. He has his detractors, but I think he’s a good coach, a great person, and he does things the right way. At 65, he’s still got a lot to give, so if I were the AD at a mid-major school, I’d hire him in a second.
But I digress.
At K-State, one of the tougher jobs in the rugged Big 12, my choice would be North Texas coach Grant McCasland, who like Chris Beard (Little Rock, Texas Tech, Texas) is a quick-turnaround artist who’s won everywhere he’s been.
McCasland has a great pedigree, having served on Scott Drew’s staff at Baylor, and he can’t help but win 20-plus games, no matter where he goes.
He started his head-coaching career at Midwestern State in 2009-10 and went 30-3 and led the Mustangs to the NCAA Division II Elite Eight. The next year he won 25 games and took Midwestern State back to the DII Elite Eight. After that he jumped to Baylor, where he stayed until 2016.
Here’s where the similarities to Beard start to get uncanny.
Like Beard, McCasland enjoyed one successful year at a Sun Belt Conference school (Arkansas State, 20-12) and then jumped to a school in Texas. In five seasons at North Texas, McCasland has won at least 20 games four times and 18 in the season he didn’t.
Again, easy hire.
Maryland—A lot of pundits think Cooley would be a fit here, but maybe those pundits don’t realize how much money Cooley makes, or that he’s built a nice career in his hometown. When Michigan expressed interest in Cooley in 2019, Providence stepped up with a megabucks deal. Cooley seems like he’s committed. Not every coach is a job-hopping opportunist. Some just realize they’ve got it made where they are, and I’ll bet Cooley is among them.
Maryland should approach VCU coach Mike Rhoades. Like McCasland, he’s won at every level. He spent 10 years at Randolph-Macon and compiled a .722 winning percentage. From there he became associate head coach at VCU and helped Shaka Smart lead the Rams to the 2011 Final Four.
VCU’s success helped Rhoades land the head-coaching job at Rice, no easy gig. But after a pair of 12-20 seasons, the Owls finished 23-12 in 2016-17, perfect timing that allowed Rhoades to jump to VCU, where Will Wade stayed just two years before taking the LSU job. In five seasons at Richmond, Rhoades has never won fewer than 18 games, has a .669 winning percentage, and has the Rams in contention to grab an NCAA Tournament bid for the third time.
He’s a good coach, a good guy, and knows how to recruit the Maryland-Virginia-Washington, D.C. area.
Louisville—The easy choice would be former Louisville player and long-time Kentucky assistant Kenny Payne, now an assistant with the New York Knicks. But there’s some question about whether he has an interest in the job.
So let’s suppose Payne wants to remain in the NBA. Where does Louisville go? I say Dennis Gates, the Cleveland State coach and Leonard Hamilton protégé. Gates has experience fixing a gutted program. He inherited a disaster at Cleveland State, and worse, he wasn’t hired until July 26, 2018. That first season ended in a predictable 11-21 record, but he flipped the script the next two seasons. In 2020-21, he led the Vikings to a 19-8 record and appearance in the NCAA Tournament. This season, the Vikings, 20-10, were knocked out of the Horizon League Tournament by Wright State.
Gates signed a six-year contract in May 2020, but there’s no doubt Louisville can pull together the coin for Gates’ buyout.
Some might question the 42-year-old Gates’ experience, but he learned his lessons well from not only Hamilton but Stan Jones, an FSU assistant and one of the best tacticians in the game.
I’ve talked to Gates a couple of times over the years and found him to be bright, engaging, and wired into the recruiting scene. When pondering the question of Gates’ upward mobility, I always think back to this quote from the 2019-20 edition of Blue Ribbon College Basketball Yearbook about what his experience at perennial ACC power FSU did for him.
“He has restored three major programs,” Gates said of Hamilton. “The amount of work he put in during those rebuilds speaks volumes. So, I’ve learned how to build the right way. I’ve learned how to manage and make decisions. And I also learned how to build relationships.”
Missouri—Trust me on this one, Murray State coach Matt McMahon is ready for a step up to the big time. Some might say he’s already in the big time, even as he’s spent the last seven seasons at Murray State.
This season, the Racers, coming off an uncharacteristic 13-13 record and tie for fifth in the Ohio Valley Conference, bounced back better than even McMahon could have hoped. Having claimed the OVC Tournament championship and the third NCAA Tournament bid of McMahon’s tenure, the Racers, the first team to reach 30 wins this season (30-2), are ranked 19th in both major polls, are atop any credible mid-major polls, are No. 21 in the NCAA’s Net Rankings and No. 27 in KenPom’s rankings.
Can that success translate to the SEC? Consider this passage from Blue Ribbon College Basketball Yearbook where McMahon explained that 13-13 2020-21 season. Clearly, McMahon has a strong grasp of the fundamentals. And by the way, he can recruit, too.
Matt McMahon has moved on from the pandemic. While acknowledging the extra burden COVID-19 placed on his and every other program last season, he doesn’t necessarily blame the virus for Murray State’s uncharacteristic dalliance with break-even basketball. Instead, he blamed a lack of the Racers’ longstanding bedrocks—toughness and gritty defense.
“We didn’t impact winning enough,” McMahon says. “Our [number of] free throws were down. Our defense suffered. Bottom line, we weren’t tough enough.”
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